Salman Rushdie suspect pleads not guilty

According to his lawyer, 24-year-old Hadi Matar has pleaded not guilty to charges of attempted murder and assault at a court appearance, just a day after he repeatedly stabbed Author Salman Rushdie at a public appearance in New York. The 75 year old Rushdie, was set to deliver a lecture on artistic freedom when Matar rushed the stage and stabbed the Indian-born writer, who has lived with a bounty on his head since his 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses”.

Following hours of surgery, Rushdie was on a ventilator and unable to speak as of Friday evening. The novelist was likely to lose an eye and had nerve damage in his arm and wounds to his liver.

The stabbing was condemned by writers and politicians around the world as an assault on freedom of expression. In a statement on Saturday, President Joe Biden commended the “universal ideals” that Rushdie and his work embody. Adding that the ability to share ideas without fear, are the building blocks of any free and open society.”

Neither local nor federal authorities offered any additional details on the investigation on Saturday. Police said on Friday they had not established a motive for the attack.
An initial law enforcement review of Matar’s social media accounts showed he was sympathetic to Shi’ite extremism and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), although no definitive links had been found.
The IRGC is a powerful faction that controls a business empire as well as elite armed and intelligence forces that Washington accuses of carrying out a global extremist campaign.

The assault was premeditated; prosecutors said in court that Matar traveled by bus to Chautauqua Institution, and bought a pass that admitted him to Rushdie’s talk. Attendees said there were no obvious security checks.

Rushdie, who was born into a Muslim Kashmiri family in Mumbai, before moving to Britain, has long faced death threats for “The Satanic Verses,” viewed by some as containing blasphemous passages. The book was banned in many countries with large Muslim populations.

In 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, pronounced a fatwa, or religious edict, calling on Muslims to kill the author and anyone involved in the book’s publication for blasphemy. Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of the novel, was stabbed to death in 1991 in a case that remains unsolved.